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Sorry. I got carried away by ‘me’. A good single malt, sipped while watching sunset over the St. Johns River.

Giving thanks for my friends, alive and dead, and the ability to wake up tomorrow and ‘keep on truckin’.

Don’t post while drinking!

Lord. I don’t know where to start. Yesterday just got back from putting flags on graves in central FL.

Never did such before. My life is private... I get almost paranoid when someone says, ‘thanks for your service.” In the 60s and 79s, it was my duty as a citizen. ‘Eff them all if they are just now realizing what ‘duty/honor/country means.

Some were taking photos. Tried to hide. This is a private voyage. In memoryof those who didn’t make it back.

I’m being nice, despite a large margarita - its been in the high 90s here today.

I’ve forgotten more about littoral engineering than most people know. I was battalion staff for the 11th Trans Battalion/7 Trans Group in the 70s when they knew what the hell they were doing. This ?#%#? is under control of the 7th Trans Group Expeditionary.

I’ve lived on an old Norwegian SAR cutter for years- since 1998, and brought her over from Sweden via the Arctic Ocean.

- - -

As others have pointed out - there is probably a reason why a port wasn’t already there. I’d have looked at met and sea conditions, bitched, and declared - I’ll do what I can. Orders is orders. FJB!

To the comment about army boats - we had more hulls (don’t know about tonnage) than the navy and we knew how to maneuver them! Gloating aside, In the last few month I’ve looked at readiness info and air photos of 3rd Port, Ft. Eustis, and I’m sick to my stomach!

Reminicent of my esperience - except the cat never goes outside except by accident. I have extensive training in immunology, but am actually a CV physiologist.

As a farm kid, I was often exposed to poison ivy; rarely, poison oak. Never a problem. While an undergrad, I sometimes picked the species for botany herbarium collections. (snark - they didn’t want to reciprocate by collecting crotalids).

Years later, I ran a biomed company. My chief tool and die maker had a Wisconsin farm (NOT a hobby farm) and raised Scotch Highland cattle. I ate 1.5/year.

One spring I was out helping him with a barn raising when a neighbor stopped by to tell him he has cattle out on the county road. Yup! He had just separated calves from mammas and the calves were bawling.

One mama took down two fences to get to the complainer. We rounded them up and restrung the fencing. He warned me - there is poison ivy on the fence lines.

I said something along the line of, “Don’r worry, I don’t react.” The next two days were an epiphany.

I could densesitize, or avoid. Now on my Florida acres, I avoid and kill the MF plants.

3 1/2 hours since you posted and no one has responded. I’ll try. I assume Joshus C meant the practice of plastic bags and a large purse into which you shovel the food for consumption at home.

While a grad student working on my PhD in biophysics & physiology, I had occasion to get my basal metabolic rate measured to confirm what an undergrad TA experience had indicated. My BMR was 3+ SD high. I’d been ca 145-147 lbs and 6’ through my teens and the military.

Life was pretty good, with the GI Bill and an ONR research assistantship but about 1x per 2 weeks I’d bicycle 12 miles to a local chain buffet and eat until surfeit.

Once, ca 50 years ago, a new manager came on duty. He eventually sat down at a neighboring table and watched to see if I was stealing food.

He knew that I knew that, etc. I made two more passes than I ordinarily would have just to show him he needed to reset his metrics.

He should have asked the staff. They knew me by name and let me store my bike in the basement. A bigger problem for the managers was having to run the staff back to their jobs - they sometimes gathered at nearby tables to listen to we grad and med students talk about the week’s events.

I read the entire post but have not investigated further. I know the perp disappeared.

Too bad if he had an accident and the top tube of the bicycle somehow mangled his testicles.

Used to regularly drive down from Palatka to eat at Hollerbachs. Another favorite was European Cafe & Schnitzel House in Ormond Beach.

Seems to be safer to stay in the boonies w/ 8-10 foot ‘gators.

Oh goody. I get to make an opaque cover to use when I reread Cichester’s ‘”Gypsy Moth” Circles the World’ in public.

I’ll blame it on my bourbon. I’m not certain where you are going with this. I think I empathize, but,. Go back to the late ‘60s. I was a farm boy raised in the midwest. Courted by schools across the world ‘cause I was the connsumate nerd.

Full National Merit when that meant something. Finished a BA and a BS in three years (only germaine because it gave DOD 1st Army Training a headache)

Enrolled in ROTC at a second institution because my vision - from trauma - was not acceptible in my alma mater’s Navy or Airdaile programs. I did it because I thought I owed it to my country. Not because I expected anything.

When the sytem woke up to the fact that I was matriculating, and hadn’t yet gone to ‘summer camp’, pandimonium ensued.

In short, they realized I was 4F cause of past retinal damage. I sat before a medical review board, pleading to stay in.

They granted an exemption. Two years later, I was offered an RA commission and some tantilizing incentives. But I returned to civilian life.

The GI Bill made grad school a lot more pleaseant. Would I have been pissed if I was told I couldn’t take advantage of what I ahd been promised? Damn right. As now - I’m ineligible for VA benefits because of my income unless I declare/demonstrate my deficincies are service-related. That is a game I won’t suit up for.

But - there are easily 100k people world-wide enjoying a quality life today because of what I did as a biomed engineer and CV physiologist in industry.

I’ll grant you a point in that I would have done so anyhow. It was my driving passion through grad school and later in life. But how dare you compare me to a young parasite Biden or JAG who never humped an M14 in the boonies.

Rant off.

Darn. Good on you. As an ex-biomed engineer & cardiovascular physiologist I’m still giving you full credit for performance under fire!

You should have billed the hospital!

Interesting story and tag line. I empathize. I’m biomed engineer/CV physiologist/biophysicist. Friends from high school were Caltech geoengineers who migrated to N. Dakota. (one married an attorney so he’s comfortable)

I quite working in 1996 but I know what your thread of fate entailed. Gave up flying (mostly ‘cause of vision and work committments - don’t have pic of Cessna 340 in source for freerepublic) I’m ornery. Grew up farming in ND. Then mining on ‘duh range’ in MN. I’ll survive because parents installed that in us. But I worry about my god and great god-children.

To get back to the reasons for the post - High Flight
by J G Magee

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;”

and - despite growing up in MN/WI I never learned to water ski. At age 35 two friends - a pharmacist and an osteo-surgeon both at Brooks Army) had me fly to TX. They had me, sore and bitching, barefoot and on slalom in 4 days. The pharmacist was my CFII and is probably now retired from SW Air.

My respects and admiration. I like to to think I’d do this for family or dear friends. Spent a lot of years looking at the immunological aspects of transplants and stem cells for regenerative medicine before it was ‘a thing’.

To paraphrase Kipling - ‘you are a better man than I.’

Thanks for making me rethink my knee-jerk reply.

I haven’t ‘worked’ for 28 years, ‘cause I was one of the best in the world at what I did. But the point was/is - I did what I could AND what I wanted to do. No ‘effing bureaucrat got between me and employers.

Nor, when I started my own business, did they screw with me other than collecting taxes and fees. My customers and I decided what my output was worth!

Thus should it be always.

Y’all might find this imnteresting. One month ago, at a nearby camp.

https://alphanews.org/minneapolis-homeless-encampment-leveled-by-fire-thursday/

After leaving the army, I went back to school to work on my PhD in biophysics. I lived in an apartment on Stevens Ave for years just a few blocks from the camp described in this article. It was a very nice neighborhood in the mid-70s.

I quit driving theough the old neighborhood a year after the mostly-peaceful Floyd demonstrations. Incidentaly, this month marks the 50th anniversary of Uncle Hugo’s sci fi bookstore. It was closed for two years after arson destroyed it. I rode my bicycle or Toyota FJ40 past it twice a day, 7 days a week.

An email I just sent out:

Ah, yes. Sci. American. A once great publication.

30 years behind the times. I, in a land far away, a long time ago, has a 130-pound, 9.5 ft Burmese python in the freezer.

Thawed and steaked it. It was destined for a Dermestid beetle skeletonization but I never found the time to bring it to the UofMN zoology department.

Brought it to a potluck at XXXXXXXX [censored] - suitably labeled - so people would not mistake it for a large salmonid. [I had previously brought a low-country stew which included squirrel. I didn’t label it - just assumed that everyone knew that Brunswick stew included rodent or marsupial]

People were leery - my reputation preceded me - but it was well-received. Did not flake like a fish, but was tender and nondescript in flavor. No, it did NOT taste like chicken.

I though twice about leaving a gift for Teddy. I’ve been to Arlington twice on other-than-internment visits. It would have taken a little planning as his grave site is rather exposed and south of JFK and Robert’s.

As much as I abhor the SOB for all that he did (Mary Joe, immigration, waitress sandwiches) he did serve in the army.

Damn, I’m getting senile.

And back when we had vertically-integrated base industries - it meant a longer shipping season for iron ore and taconite pellets to go down=lake through the locks to feed the furnaces of Indiana and Pennsylvania

I grew up in northern MN. Spent many weeks on Isle Royale with wonderful memories of Washington Harbor fishing, seiches!, and hiking the ridge. Decades later, started my PhD in Ecology & Behavioral Biology. Met USGS’s L. David Mech several times.

Look up his research on the wolf/moose ecosystem.

My snark? The Isle Royale moose were always ‘happy’ when the lake didn’t freeze over and allow wolf packs to migrate from the MN shore.

As an ex pilot - use a float plane, you asses!

I applaud your cynicism. I did this stuff once - 5 decades ago. I was told that I was planning the first LOTS operation since the Korean war. A joint British/US task force pretended to do a landing/resupply op at Ft. Story, VA.

Much of it was rote. But I learned a lot, especially from the USMC whose special jigs, etc had not ever been assigned an FSN. [and damn, the Brits had discontinued their rum ration!]

On a tangent - I also remember the USS Liberty being attacked by Israeli air. Discussed this many times with Israeli officers attached to my unit - by then I was S3.

Uncomfortable conversations. And then I sat on my duffel bag next to a runway at Ft. Bragg during the Yom Kippur War, waiting to be detailed to set up a port to support the IDF.

My IDF acquaintances told me they were burning through all their munitions each day, expecting to be resupplied the next. I was < 30 days to ETS!

eFFJB.

Ironically - just published paper regarding a nasty parasitic disease caused by accidentally ingesting bugs. I find it ironic - once upon a time I was a biophyscicist/biomed engineer designing stuff as a last-ditch therapy.

Now the plague may be extending into Florida.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/oral-transmission-chagas-disease-has-severe-effects-2024a100042f?240307&src=FYE&ecd=WNL_recnlnew1_broad_US_perso_etid6358029&uac=439418DR&impID=6358029

From my email to friends:

Coming to a Florida site near you. The article confirms an earlier study that claims 30% of examined ‘kissing bugs’ in Florida were infected with Trypanosoma cruzi. I see these conenose bugs regularly. Sometimes even on the outside of my window screens. You don’t want to be bitten, even by a clean bug. Hurts like hell.

So now that vector based xmission is being reduced, oral xmission becomes a problem; “And as organic farming methods without insecticides become increasingly common, more research is needed in these areas, both in Latin America and in the United States, to understand if oral transmission of T cruzi is occurring.”

Ironic. So instead of the Assassin Bug biting you, you, in effect, bite them. The parasite load is estimated to be 100x greater. Yes, it is treatable IF recognized.